Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, July 5. The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s wondrously strange, knotty late works. The pitfalls are many but so are the rewards. Compassion, contrition, forgiveness for great wrongs and reconciliation are its towering themes. Dance gives direct access to such heart-stirring emotions, or does at its best….
Author: Deborah
Bennelong, Bangarra Dance Theatre
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, July 1. In Mathinna (2008) and Patyegarang (2014), Bangarra Dance Theatre’s artistic director, Stephen Page, shone a light on individual First Nations stories that may otherwise have stayed hidden from general view and certainly been seen only from a colonial perspective. Bennelong adds another important work to this growing body…
Woolf Works, The Royal Ballet
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, June 29. Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works is a monumental act of artistic daring, claiming for dance the right, and the ability, to bring one of the great voices in English literature to the stage. The translation from printed word to wordless movement is of necessity very free but…
Patricia Barker to lead RNZB
Royal New Zealand Ballet has appointed American Patricia Barker as its new artistic director. She leaves Michigan’s Grand Rapids Ballet to take up the position and starts in Wellington later this month. Barker succeeds Francesco Ventriglia, who announced his resignation in November, well short of the end of his first contract with the company. Ventriglia…
Don Quixote, West Australian Ballet
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, May 11 and 12. Don Quixote is all fluff and high spirits. Based glancingly on the Cervantes novel, the ballet foregrounds the romance between Kitri, an innkeeper’s daughter, and the impecunious barber Basilio. Kitri’s father would prefer her to marry money, which turns up in the form of Gamache, a fool….
Swan Lake, Queensland Ballet
Queensland Performing Arts Centre, May 5. Queensland Ballet’s Swan Lake had a 42nd Street quality on opening night as junior company member Joel Woellner was chosen to dance Prince Siegfried alongside the seasoned Odette-Odile of QB principal artist – and former top-ranked star at the National Ballet of Cuba – Yanela Piñera. Piñera has presence…
Nutcracker – The Story of Clara
The Australian Ballet, Sydney Opera House, May 2. Many decades ago, when I was visiting Canada, a young woman asked me whether Christmas was in June in Australia. She knew winter in the southern hemisphere happened in the middle months of the year. It followed then, that Christmas must be in June because Christmas is…
Orb, Sydney Dance Company
Full Moon, choreographed by Cheng Tsung-lung, Ocho, choreographed by Rafael Bonachela. Sydney Dance Company, Roslyn Packer Theatre Walsh Bay, May 1. At first glance the two works in Sydney Dance Company’s Orb look quite different but they are close kin under the skin and together make an exceptionally absorbing double bill. Cheng Tsung-lung, who choreographed…
Faster: The Australian Ballet
Sydney Opera House, April 12 The key work in The Australian Ballet’s Faster triple bill was supposed to be Wayne McGregor’s new Multiverse, which premiered at the Royal Ballet in November to largely disobliging reviews. A change in programming quickly ensued. Multiverse was out, Infra (2008) was in. It wasn’t unreasonable to program Multiverse sight…
Raw, Queensland Ballet
Works by Liam Scarlett, Greg Horsman and Christopher Bruce. Queensland Ballet, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, March 17. Death comes to us all eventually but does it have to come so cruelly and so soon to so many? Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances was made in 1981 in response to human rights abuses in Pinochet’s Chile…
